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Method Podcast, Episode 5

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Creative Director Rachel Been on Material Design, new emoji, and the creative power of curiosity

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Google Design

Hosted by Interaction Designer Aidan Simpson, the Method podcast provides an inside look at the journeys and creative decisions of designers at Google. In this episode, Aidan speaks with Material Design Creative Director Rachel Been about her journey from photojournalism to design, the challenges of making a design system at scale, and what's most exciting about the latest emoji release. Listen and subscribe to the Method podcast on Google Play, iTunes, or RSS.

A few highlights:

On making Material Design, 1:03“To create a system that potentially works for thousands of products—to define and spec a button that different product teams could functionally use—it’s a challenge to make that work.”

On creative direction, 10:39"I don't think there's one definitive description. How I describe my process is: I touch a lot of different things and I look at a lot of different things. I delegate. It's really a cross-functional discipline and more than anything, a creative director has a top-level understanding of the way things are conceived, made, and eventually built."

On the value of shared vocabulary, 12:09"As designers, we need to start using language that's applicable to engineering. We obviously have terminology that's super design-centric, and a lot of the time that doesn't translate into how engineers actually build things."

On what leads to growth, 13:52"The anxiety of persistent imposter syndrome—as uncomfortable as that is on a daily basis—has led me to expand my capabilities and feel empowered in many ways."

Handy info and links for this episode:

Material Design: A design system, created by Google, for crafting digital experiences

PgM: Program Manager, the person tracking the day-to-day progress of a project

Unicode Consortium: A non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard, including emoji

Holo: The design system released with Android 3 and 4, which directly preceded the creation of Material Design

IC: Individual Contributor, a non-management member of a team

Rachel Been is a San Francisco-based Creative Director currently working on Material Design. Initially hired to be Google Play’s first Art Director, Rachel now works across multiple product teams to implement and evolve the Material Design system.

Google Design

Google Design is a cooperative effort led by a group of designers, writers, and developers at Google. We work across teams to publish original content, produce events, and foster creative and educational partnerships that advance design and technology.